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As the Stage 3 plan is neither complete nor funded, there isn’t a lot of definitive detail.

In Stage 3 Ottawa may extend commuter rail west to Kanata and south to Barrhaven, both from the west side of Line 1 (the red line, also called the Confederation Line).

It may also extend rail to Quebec over the existing but currently unused Prince of Wales Bridge, although there is also a Gatineau proposal to create a west-end rail system in Quebec that would run across the Prince of Wales Bridge.

To some extent you can get a sense of Stage 3 from the transportation network in the 2013 Transportation Master Plan. (The Transportation Master Plan normally would have been updated in 2018, but the city wants to complete Stage 1 of the rail system first.)

This map is a vision for the future (roughly 2028-2031 timeframe). The actual network will depend on many different factors including funding and route optimisation. Red is rail (Light Rail Transit), blue is bus (Bus Rapid Transit).

Stage 3 is still at least 5 years (2023) from being finalised and started, since Stage 2 has to complete first. Completion of Stage 3 would be something like 2028 at the earliest.

Kanata (Line 1 West)

Ottawa’s east-west commuter rail Confederation Line (Line 1) is completely grade-separated, which means that it never intersects with car traffic. This is absolutely the correct design for a high-reliability commuter rail network. When extending the network into car-designed Kanata, however, it has the unusual result of a recommendation that part of the line be elevated. Any time you put rail under the ground or elevated above ground level it’s more expensive, but I guess there are a lot of highways for the Kanata extension to cross.

Kanata LRT Stage 3 Map

In the map below, the proposed corridor and station locations are shown, with elevated portions of the line in green, at-grade in blue, and underground in yellow.

Map from section 8-3, page 168 of the August 2018 Report Draft from DropBox.

Stations heading west and then south:

Moodie Station (planned for Stage 2)

March Station

Kanata Town Centre Station

Terry Fox Station

Didsbury Station

Campeau Station (line turns south after this station)

Palladium [stadium] Station

Maple Grove Station

Hazeldean Station

The diagram below from the earlier May 2018 report to City Council – Corridor Options (PDF) shows the stations a bit more clearly, although to be frank neither diagram is going to win any awards for clarity.

Barrhaven (Line 1 South)

Barrhaven is new addition to the LRT evaluations, although a rail line to Barrhaven was always envisioned as part of the Ultimate Network. The line would connect south from west Line 1 Stage 2 Baseline Station.

There is a document from Transportation Committee on October 3, 2018 (also see meeting Agenda):

Barrhaven LRT Stage 3 Map

Above from page 5 of the Statement of Work document. Note that this is a study corridor, it’s not a proposed or final alignment.

Prince of Wales Bridge

You can see in the Ultimate Network at the top of this blog post that there is a plan for OC Transpo’s commuter rail service to cross the Prince of Wales Bridge, but I don’t know any details. I don’t even know whether they would use Line 1 or just extend Line 2 northwards. I’m happy to add details if they are provided.

Addendum

These are very early days, so rely on the City of Ottawa for official word on the specific rail lines and stations for Stage 3 LRT.

Line 1, the red line, runs east-west. It’s also called the Confederation Line. It uses all-electric trains, running on dual tracks (i.e. separate tracks for each direction).

Line 2, the green line, runs north-south. It’s also called the Trillium Line. It will use diesel trains, and has segments of single track (meaning that trains have to wait in carefully-managed stops, in order to share the track in both directions).

Line 1 extends east to Trim Station, but on the west side it splits, with part heading west and part turning south. Line 2 adds stations and continues south, but then takes a rather dramatic turn to the west at the end of line.

Stage 2 System Map

In terms of implementation, the project is separated into three separate parts for the east and west (Line 1) and south (Line 2) extensions. You can see the planned system in this Stage 2 map, including a Line 1 extension that was added in the west to Moodie Station and the new west turning to Limebank Station at the end of Line 2. Below map from Stage 2 – Where.

Black circles with black text boxes are new stations, and the new segments are also shown as thinner. On the green line (Line 2), two stations are added within the existing Stage 1 segment: Gladstone Station and Walkley Station. Line 2 also gets an extension to the airport, but my understanding is that this is not a direct train; you have to change to an airport shuttle train at South Keys Station.

The timelines are notional, basically intended to show that one part can be delivered before another. A general guideline would be a 2023-2025 for completion of the entire system, particularly given the delayed launch of Stage 1. Note that bus rapid transit (the remainder of the Transitway buses) is shown in grey.

Here’s what the Stage 1 commuter rail (light rail transit, LRT) network will look like when it launches in 2019. This post focuses on the rail maps; there will also be lots of bus route changes.

Maps

Line 1, the Confederation Line, the red line, runs from Tunney’s Pasture Station in the west to Blair Station in the east. It is an all-electric, dual-track line (i.e. separate tracks for each direction).

Line 2, the Trillium Line, the green line, runs from Bayview Station in the north to Greenboro Station in the south. It is a diesel line with some single tracking, which means trains have to wait at stopping points in order to share the single track in both directions.

It also makes for a pretty simple map, from the current OC Transpo Route 2 results page, PDF map option.

The lines have a single transfer point at Bayview Station.

I don’t know of a map that shows just Line 1 and Line 2 together for Stage 1. There is a map (PNG) that shows all rapid routes, which includes the two train lines in red and green as well as buses in blue. Basically the blue is what remains of the workhorse Transitway / Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines in Stage 1. (Map from OC Transpo New service types page.)

Interactive Maps & Downloadable Data

You can see current and proposed station footprints and track alignments in GeoOttawa. Go to More layers… and select Rail Implementation Office at the very bottom (below Miscellaneous). http://maps.ottawa.ca/geoottawa/ Note that GeoOttawa requires Flash.

There is also open data for O-Train Stations and O-Train Tracks, including Google Earth KMZ format. I don’t know whether this is just the north-south line (Line 2) or whether it includes the forthcoming Line 1.

Addendum

In renaming and rebranding the lines there may be some confusion. Previously O-Train referred just to the north-south train, now it is used for the entire system. Also previously route 1 and route 2 were downtown core frequent buses. Route 1 was changed to route 6, and route 2 basically ended up as two routes, the 11 and the 12.

The Stage 1 rail lines won’t change, but nevertheless always go to the OC Transpo website for the latest official information about routes.

Thursday April 9, 2015

O’Connor Bikeway

Ottawa has a Cycling Plan that includes separated lanes (Ottawa calls them “cycle tracks” running east-west and north-south). The first major north-south route will be on O’Connor (although it turns into painted bike lanes in the Glebe).

(There is a larger issue, which is that cycling is still funded through a secondary “if we have money left” process, not as part of the main infrastructure in the budget.)

Section 1: some pedestrians
Section 2: Basically zero pedestrians. While this may look like it fronts on houses, they are suburban mall houses, with a giant wall all along the sidewalk (see image below).
Section 3: Very dangerous crossing of Ogilvie.
Section 4: This fronts on a drive-in Starbucks and an old-age home, so in theory there could be some pedestrians.

CSE MUP: public multi-use pathway (currently closed while CSE in under construction; see image below)

I’m not proposing this as an ideal route. It’s just a thought exercise about how a cyclist could actually get safely (i.e. not on the road) from Blair Station to the NRC campus (or with a longer route to Cite Collegiale). I’m not a vehicular cyclist and I will never be. I’m certainly not a suburban mall and highway vehicular cyclist. The sidewalks selected are basically unused (they don’t front on anything but fence, blank building walls and trees), I can’t imagine they get more than a dozen pedestrians a day. You’d want to count pedestrians and if the numbers made sense, change the sidewalks to be multi-use pathways. You’d also want to do some work around the bus stops and particularly at the Ogilvie crossing to make it safe for everyone.

If you want to add Cite Collegiale you basically make the entire east-side sidewalk on Bathgate a MUP. The entire east sidewalk north past the old-age home fronts on uninterrupted government-owned trees, no one walks there. You’d just need to figure out some treatment around the few bus stops.

Ideally there would also be secure bike parking at Blair Station, for people who don’t want to take their bike back and forth on the (forthcoming) train.

This also assumes that the central road through the NRC campus continues to be blocked as it is now, so that pedestrians and cyclists have to use either Bathgate or Blair to go north.

Transit-Oriented Development?

I thought enabling this kind of cycling connectivity was part of the planning they would do in the Blair Station Transit-Oriented Development plan, but it isn’t. The TOD plans have two built-in assumptions:

Because the LRT is commuter rail, you are arriving from elsewhere. As far as the TOD plans are concerned, no one lives or works near the LRT stations (where near is a 20 minute walk or ~5 minute bike ride).

When you arrive, you work or live directly within the 800m station zone, in some mixed-use fantasy development that spontaneously springs up in what are currently parking lots around single-level malls. You are enclosed in the station zone, which exists in total isolation. It’s basically just the suburban office park next to a mall, with more residential and towers.

That kind of development does happen to some extent outside Vancouver, but Vancouver housing costs a bajillion dollars, and this kind of development basically gives you enclosed nodes, not stations as the new village centres for existing housing and employment.

“Burnaby doesn’t have a traditional downtown centre, like in Langley or Maple Ridge or Chilliwack,” Mr. Geller said. “Burnaby has a collection of shopping districts and business parks.”

This is not modern development. This is just Place du Portage with housing and a bunch of theoretical walking and cycling and public space amenities that no one will ever use. Inward-facing, isolated from the surrounding context.

You can see from the September 2013 TOD information session that the Blair scope includes mostly the mall and its parking lots, and a tiny skim of housing surrounding it. The vast housing to the north and the major employment and school nodes to the north get not even a sketch of connectivity.

Blair TOD – Pedestrian and Cycling Network (PDF) – all on-street cycling. In the suburbs. Where no one expects to see a bike. Particularly laughable is the existing cycling on Ogilvie, which by putting cyclists in high-speed traffic is roughly like aiming bullets at the cyclists and seeing if they can dodge. Other than vague-at-best “bike on the road and get there somehow” there’s no indication of how commuters would get by bike from Blair to CSE, CSIS, NRC (all with thousands of workers minutes from the station) or to Cite Collegiale.

Blair TOD – Street Network (PDF) on the other hand has bold black lines of car traffic arrowing everywhere. Who would ever walk or cycle to or from a station? Park-and-ride or “kiss-and-ride” are clearly the main modes imagined.

• Investing $3 billion in public transit to build on the Confederation Line by extending rail further East, West and South of the City
• Bringing 270,000 more residents within five kilometres of LRT and ensuring that close to 700,000 residents (67 per cent of the population) will have ease of access to rapid transit

So that’s ~$2 billion for the Confederation Line from Tunney’s to Blair, plus $3 billion for LRT from Bayshore to Place d’Orleans, plus existing double-tracking of the O-train and new O-trains, plus extending the O-train. Plus BRT to Kanata. $5 billion. To 2025.

This is not a tram. It is grade-separated commuter rail. “Grade-separated” is a fancy way of saying the train never intersects with road traffic – it always goes beside, above, or under a road. It never has to wait for cars and cars never have to wait for it. (I think all of the LRT is grade-separated, I’m not sure if all of the O-train is.) During the commuting peak, this train will run very frequently and very reliably.

This, in other words, is five billion dollars of being delightful to commuters. This is a choice.

They all, without exception, said that we should be delightful… to pedestrians. To pedestrians first, and then if we can, to cyclists. (This is Tumlin’s terminology. Gehl would say something like “invite pedestrians to walk and linger in the city and disinvite the car; you get what you invite” but it amounts to the same thing.)

It is incredibly cheap to be nice to pedestrians. Flat sidewalks. Shoveled clear sidewalks and intersections in the winter (not just plowed; the plow leaves a layer of snow on the sidewalk and a giant pile of slush in the intersection). Pedestrian priority for crosswalks. Traffic enforcement (particularly left and right turns on red, which should be banned at busy intersections). Speed enforcement, through road design (to 30km/h anywhere in the city, and 10km/h anywhere residential). Interesting things to see, shops at ground level. This costs, seriously, nothing compared to roads and rail. A few tens of millions of dollars for delight.

This is not crazy. This is Copenhagen, Paris, London, New York, … this is every city that wants to attract a creative workforce, with high wages and high property values.

Instead, after listening to expert after expert, Ottawa is bowing to the suburban ring outside the city core, and making the commute delightful.

This does almost nothing for the city life itself, because the commute is a weird twice daily peak event. From roughly 8 to 9, hundreds of thousands of people try to jam themselves as quickly as possible from their homes in the suburbs to their offices.

Note I didn’t say to the city. This 1950s model of commuting is basically a teleporter fantasy we try to implement using cars and trains. Ideally you step into your car inside your home garage, and minutes later, preferably without paying much attention, you “appear” inside your work garage. In the evening, reverse. This is not anything to do with city life. This could be taking people from anywhere to anywhere. This is basically a giant piston, shoving people in in the morning and out at night.

For commuters, the train must be frequent, fast and reliable. Say every 5-10 minutes. With minimal and very fast changes. So we have to scale the system to handle the peak of the peak. Hundreds of thousands. You don’t need to spend time on the waiting area, because no one will be waiting long.

But outside the peak, this is a ridiculous system. You have a commuter rail system designed to push hundreds of thousands in an hour, that then has almost nothing to do for the rest of the day. A trickle of some thousands throughout the rest of the day. Hardly worth running it very often.

So basically it’s $5 billion dollars for 10 hours a week (8-9, 5-6, M-F). This is not counting billions more for highway widening and extension, for the commuters you don’t shift to rail.

So the people during the day who are actually moving around the city get to stand in the uncovered stations by the tracks in the middle of winter and wait, because they’re not commuters, so the train won’t be running very often. And mostly the rail takes you to malls and schools and employment nodes, not interesting neighbourhoods with local shops. And if you want to move around downtown – well it’s the bus for you, and an unheated shelter, if you’re lucky.

You can use Transit-Oriented Design to make the commuter train look less ridiculous, to give people a reason to use the train to get around from station to station during the day. But unless you do it well, you’re just going to get a vertical suburb at the station, not what TOD is supposed to be, which is a walkable village around the station.

What you actually do in a real city is have commuter rail AND local rail (trams and if necessary subways) AND bus AND cycling AND most importantly of all, delightful walking. What people remember of Paris is walking around. Most people never touch the commuter rail, the RER. If they do, they find it empty and often a bit dismal (a lot of graffiti and neglect). What Ottawa is choosing is to build a city with RER and basically nothing else, for decades. No trams (a tram is rail that runs on the street, with stops at the edge of the sidewalk). No delightful walking. No (also incredibly cheap) separated bike lanes, just painted lines that protect no one from tonnes of speeding steel.

This is council’s choice to make. As a commuter rail system, it will be pretty good. It will do nothing to transform the life of the city though. It is a suburb-sustaining project, not a city-building project. It is much, much better than spending the money on roads. But a tiny fraction of it, 10% of it, would build some of the best pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in the entire world. Council chooses again and again not to do this. The winter pedestrian experience tells you, day after day, month after month: you are not important, you are not valued, only cars are important. The cycling experience tells you: your safety is not important, you are not valued, only cars are important.

Here’s the thing: you can’t solve the commute. Can’t. No billions, no design, no transportation in the world can solve moving a giant peak load of people tens of kilometres in two one-hour windows. If I were writing this in 1950 you could scoff. But you can see the lanes widen year after year, and yet the commute doesn’t get solved. Because you can’t solve it. You can only eliminate the factors that cause it, of which the main one is people living a long way away from work. The solution to the commute is to replace the commute with an actual liveable city where people walk and cycle short distances for work and shopping and friends, and ride the rails for very rare long distance excursions.

Instead commuter rail is a choice that will sustain a grey generic suburban city. That’s our future. That’s the will of council.

Note to city: A ZIP file of all these documents would save a lot of downloading clicks.

They’ve extracted out the parts that impact your neighbourhood into separate documents, but good luck knowing your neighbourhood from ward numbers. There are clickable maps. Here are the documents for downtown Ottawa (“inner urban”):

If you know where to find the layers, you can navigate around the Master Plan proposals in the city’s mapping system http://maps.ottawa.ca/ (GeoOttawa)

Deadlines

You have until the end of October 2013. After that, it will be another five years before the Master Plans are reviewed.

In writing, in advance of the Public Meeting and no later than November 1, 2013, or

In person at the official Public Meeting of Planning Committee on November 8, 2013 at 9:30 a.m.

What is being proposed

Bottom line is a commuter rail network (think Paris RER, mostly surface rail, sometimes underground) plus $70 million for cycling and $26 million for pedestrians (that’s spending out for decades, not next year).

Beyond the funded Confederation Line commuter rail, from Tunney’s to Blair, the unfunded Stage 2 plan reaches electric trains east-west from Bayshore to Place d’Orleans, and diesel rail south from Bayview to Bowesville. It also extends the bus rapid transit (BRT; Transitway) west and north towards Kanata. You can see the Stage 2 pamphlet (PDF).

The good news is that this is a reasonable commuter rail network, and an ambitious schedule (the Mayor wants it built by 2023). The bad news is

it requires provincial and federal funding for Stage 2 to happen

as with all municipal transit, the plan can be changed at any time at the whim of council (as happened with the previous LRT/tram North-South plan)

this kind of system should have been built before the city grew, not shoehorned in after

this expenditure will consume all available transit money until 2031 – there will be no trams (“secondary LRT” as the city calls them)

If the Greber Plan had just been a generation earlier, it would have done traditional city-building, which was to run commuter rail out to village centres. This is how much of Europe is built out. Europe still has suburbs, it’s just they are rail-connected. But we landed just at the peak of car mania and train disdain. So now we have to retrofit the commuter rail into the existing car suburb city.

Overall it is fine. I still worry that extending the lines out, particularly going beyond the Greenbelt and providing park-and-ride, just encourages people to live even farther away from the city centre.

If you want my opinion on the most impactful things that can be recommended:

the city should have one or more dedicated pedestrian planners

all consultations should include one or more sessions where the Councillor(s), planners (including traffic planners!) and citizens walk and cycle the affected area(s)

Another Puzzle Piece: Transit-Oriented Development & Station Area Plans

What is supposed to reduce the sprawl-enhancing impact of the commuter rail is transit-oriented development (TOD) around the stations. This makes for some weird looking plans, as some of the stations are at malls. Blair Station TOD envisions the big box sprawlmall of Gloucester turning into towers and a park. It is to dream.

Anyway, if you haven’t exhausted yourself providing feedback to the Master Plans, there is also a whole set of TOD plans. As usual buried away on the city site and not linked together.

Somewhere in the TOD plans there’s supposed to be 15 minute bikeshed plans, but I can’t find them. All I can find is 600m walkshed plans. With stations at malls, for e.g. Blair Station this basically leads to a plan proposing better sidewalks inside what are currently mall parking lots, but not proposing better connections to existing employment nodes nearby.

The feedback deadline was October 7, 2013 but I think that’s not fair because 1) The consultations were poorly announced and 2) the consultations were completely overshadowed by the bus-train crash.

And Beyond: The Suburbs

If somehow you’re not exhausted and are still reading, there’s yet another consultation specifically on suburban design. Here what is critical is to move suburbs to a village design, centred around transit, instead of car sprawl. Good luck fighting that fight.